


Dororo and the Space Alien

by Ainikki



Category: Dororo (Manga)
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Fluff and Crack, Gen, kids with trust issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-12-01 19:09:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20870342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ainikki/pseuds/Ainikki
Summary: In the "Dororo" manga, Hyakkimaru is followed around by various threatening things--sometimes living (like the terrifying mad dogs of history, that really did exist in ancient Japan) and sometimes not (like a random murderous pair of sandals). Hyakkimaru says, in passing, to Dororo that it's a little like being chased down by space aliens.Cue author plot bunny to have Hyakkimaru chased by space aliens.Which ones?Why, body-snatching pod people, of course.





	Dororo and the Space Alien

**Author's Note:**

> This is crackeriffic, set very early in the manga (so early, Dororo isn't even calling Hyakkimaru aniki yet) and short. Well, for me. 
> 
> Also, in the manga, Hyakkimaru can talk right off the bat. I know, it's weird to me, too.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it!

Hyakkimaru is walking along minding his own business--no, really--when he gets a full-body shiver that almost sends him sprawling. He stops still and peers behind him. Dororo is still lurking about fifty feet back, determined to follow him for her own reasons. She's not possessed, though, and so poses no threat.

Where is this feeling coming from?

Suddenly the shivering intensifies, and he leaps back just in time to see a diminutive, bald, boy-shaped object pop out of the ground before him. Details are hard to determine with his second sight--the facial features seem a little off, and the deep sensation of wrongness does not leave Hyakkimaru for an instant.

Hyakkimaru regards the--apparition?--with dispassion. Aside from slightly large, bright eyes, it doesn't look any different from any other random human, and he considers that it's probably just possessed by demons. He sighs loudly. "What a pain," he mutters, and unveils one sword arm because one is probably enough for the job and he's already killed eight people today and could use a break from full force tactics.

There's a whiz of motion to his left, and Dororo is standing in front of the boy with her arms out. "Wait! Don't kill him! It's just a kid!"

"Yeah!" the boy says. "What's your problem, mister?"

Hyakkimaru holds his sword up and back so that it presents no threat to the children. Of course, he's a child, too and he knows there's something wrong with the boy. He's never been wrong about something like this.

"Dororo, out of the way," he says, exasperation hardening the edges of his tone.

"No," she says. She takes the boy's hand. "He's coming with me. He'll get your other sword," she says, widening her eyes and puffing out her chest.

Hyakkimaru snorts and puts his sword away, flexing thread-jointed fingers. "He can try."

***

The weird boy and Dororo follow him all day, and he can't shake the ill sense that something's gone horribly wrong. When he halts for the evening, Dororo and the boy keep some distance, but he can feel their presence, close. Although the night is calm and clear, he builds a fire.

Just in case he needs another weapon.

Fire built, he settles down to sleep with both sword arms out and presented.

Then he hears it: a shuffling sound. Too many feet; definitely more than four. He springs up in the direction of the sound and discovers a two-headed monster with too many arms and far too many legs crouched over a sleeping Dororo.

"Hey, ugly," Hyakkimaru calls casually, brightly, because this is a threat he understands and his life makes sense again. "Wanna play with me?"

The monster freezes, tense; all the muscles in its back straighten and ripple at once, and it might be fascinating if it weren't so terrifying: like some kind of wild sea creature beached and preserved. Hyakkimaru puts his back directly to the fire and vaults with both swords pointed at two of the creature's eyes.

The left one hits, but the right one glances off of some kind of hard shell. Hyakkimaru grunts, right sword dangling down as he pushes the left one further into the creature's bleeding eye. His kimono is soaked and filthy and the thing starts screaming, high-pitched like the sound of the wind in a typhoon. 

Hyakkimaru's getting a headache. He plants both his feet against the monster's too-large torso and pushes himself off and back, extracting his sword and landing with feet firmly planted. He looks up, and sees one green-clawed arm come swiping at him while another other covers its injured eye and the others flail wildly in all directions.

"Dammit," Hyakkimaru says, dodging narrowly and coming up to slice the arm through as it recoils. The high-pitched screaming intensifies, and Dororo chooses this moment to wake up, blinking sleep out of her eyes.

He has to ditch this monster. Dororo, too. Traveling with others brings nothing but problems. 

He makes an X with his arms in preparation for a proper beheading, but then the creature in front of him...changes. In the time it takes to blink, the boy from before is in front of him with a broken arm and a bleeding face, crying his eyes out. Dororo stands up and grips the boy's shoulders, placing him behind her and taking a protective stance. "What's your problem, asshole?" she asks tersely through tufts of uneven hair. "I thought you didn't attack children!"

"It's not a child, it's a monster! It was trying to eat you!"

The boy says nothing to this accusation and wails louder.

***

The next day, the boy reveals that his name is Kurou, and says he came from the south. He and Dororo chat all day, and Hyakkimaru picks up most of it--but most of what Kurou says doesn't make any sense.

Bad enough being named the color black--that's unoriginality if Hyakkimaru ever saw it--but the kid seems to be getting closer to Dororo with lies. Hyakkimaru has traveled the length and breadth of Nippon and never heard of half the places Kurou mentions. Where is Asagiri? Tohijuku? Ebisaka? These places sound almost real, they're like the guesses of someone new to an area--perhaps someone visiting. Or invading.

It's a one-boy invasion and Hyakkimaru doesn't understand it at all. The only good thing about the day is that nothing else decides to follow him. Perhaps the boy-monster repels other monsters.

Or perhaps it's working with them.

***

Every day is the same.

Hyakkimaru runs all afternoon trying to shake Dororo, but she's bound and determined to have his left sword arm, hell or high water, so she follows, marking trees in case he tries to lose her by going in circles. Kurou manages to keep up--impressive, given his injuries--and attacks Dororo when she sleeps. 

For three days, Hyakkimaru intervenes before this can happen, and for three days, Dororo awakens in time to prevent Hyakkimaru from killing the monster. On the fourth day, as he watches Kurou's shadow lengthen into the thing with too many limbs, he considers his options.

Kurou is what he considers a minor pest. Certainly, he's fought stronger things in his time. Dororo is also a minor pest, albeit human, rather stupid and far too young to die at the hands of monsters, no matter how poor her self-preservation instinct seems to be. If he sits by and allows her to die--as he is very very tempted to do--then he's not better than a monster himself. 

His father had asked him to care for children, before he'd left on his quest. He sits up. Silent. He hadn't bothered to light a fire today, so all the shadows are dim. He has his second sight, but he's fairly sure the monster doesn't know about that.

And if he has to kill this thing without making a sound in order to not wake Dororo up, he's fairly sure he can manage it.

The monster is still poised over Dororo and hasn't moved to acknowledge him. That's good. He'd gone to sleep--well, pretend sleep, and three days of sleep deprivation have really not helped his mood--with both weapons drawn, so all he needs to do is be silent.

He remembers the kamaitachi that had attacked his home when he'd been around Dororo's age: so fast, so light, blades so sharp. It had destroyed the roof in an instant and torn through the floor, giving him a scar along his torso that's still there.

He needs to be like that kamaitachi: swift and brutal, so he breathes in without sound and lets the air pool in his stomach, lets it all out like a cyclone as he leaps and pushes both swords into the creature's double neck.

There's no screaming, this time. Hyakkimaru had taken a guess at where transmogrified Kurou's vocal chords were, and it seems he'd been correct. That threat eliminated, Hyakkimaru takes a step back and prepares to rend the beast limb from limb.

What happens instead surprises even him.

As he's lifting his sword to strike off the rightmost arm, the creature's two mouths open from chin to foot, wide enough to swallow him whole--which is exactly what the creature tries to do.

Hyakkimaru evades but isn't entirely successful; the creature catches both legs up to calf level and sucks in, but Hyakkimaru braces himself on his swords and digs into the soft, vulnerable flesh of Kurou's faces.

Dororo, ten feet away, tosses in her sleep but doesn't wake.

"I want a body," Kurou says. "I wanted the girl's, but it might as well be yours." 

The creature's vocal chords are cut--Hyakkimaru's sure of it--but he can hear the creature speaking, mind to mind. Apparently they have that in common.

Hyakkimaru pushes himself up and back a little, just enough to give himself a little wiggle room, and stabs the creature deeper, all the way in. It collapses to its knees--all eight of them---and writhes horribly. 

At the same time, it bites down on Hyakkimaru's legs.

Hyakkimaru doesn't scream. His legs aren't real, and the pain of being cut hits him only distantly, as if it's happening to someone else.

The creature's eyes widen as it attempts to swallow. Green-blue blood gushes from its faces, its damaged eyes, its trunklike chest and neck in all the places where Hyakkimaru has slashed or stabbed in.

Hyakkimaru uses the creature's distraction to yank his bloody sword arms out of its flesh, cross them and flick them up in an easy, practiced motion. Decapitation is immediate, and Hyakkimaru goes flying, along with the detached heads, in Dororo's direction.

It is at this moment that Dororo wakes up.

Hyakkimaru is very filthy and very tired and Dororo talks too fast and asks too many questions. He would like to sleep now.

"What the hell happened?" Dororo asks, eyes wide and white in the growing dark. "Where's Kurou? What's that thing? Why are you--"

"It was a body-snatcher," Hyakkimaru explains with his legs still inside Kurou's severed heads. It's comfortable for a second because he's lying down, but then he feels the blood dripping into his eye sockets and the damp stickiness of his kimono and realizes he's mistaken exhaustion for comfort. He needs to find a river.

"A what?" Dororo asks.

"It tried to take your body," he says, "but I kept stopping him, so he finally tried to take mine."

"And?"

"And?" Hyakkimaru raises an eyebrow. "Most of my body's not alive. He choked on my legs, and I took care of the rest." Hyakkimaru winces, but this is definitely not the worst injury he's ever had. "Help me get out of his mouth, will you."

"Uh, no."

"Why?"

"That's gross. And creepy. And I still don't know if you didn't just kill a kid for sport and hide the body."

Hyakkimaru sighs, bends down, and parts the alien's jaws with one sword arm, then repeats the procedure on the other side. With his other arm, he retrieves his damaged legs, now gored with bite marks. Wincing carefully, he slots them back into proper position and tests his limb movements with a long breath. The creature had managed to nick flesh in some places; he needs bandages.

He stops, rips off the bottom of his kimono and ties it around the join of his left prosthesis as a stopgap. He also needs to bathe thoroughly, but not before the skin around his legs has had a few days to heal.

Surprisingly, Dororo helps him tie off the makeshift bandage.

She makes a face the entire time.


End file.
